5 Reasons to Launch Your Contact Center to the Cloud

As the primary point of interaction between your business and your customers, a contact center is often the heartbeat of an organization.

Switching to a cloud contact center offers businesses of all sizes significant benefits, including newfound flexibility, new and often better cost structures, and a competitive advantage when it comes to cost, speed, and accessibility. If you’re struggling to figure out whether you should stick with your on-premises contact center, below are five reasons to seriously consider moving to the cloud.

1. Happy Employees Lead To Happy Customers

Call center agents are constantly under pressure to hit their metrics, but often become frustrated because they don’t have the necessary tools to provide the experience their customers expect. Give them the resources they need to solve their customers’ problems (AI, added channels, virtual hold, etc.) and be as efficient as possible, both turning your agents into customer heroes and reducing the cost per interaction.

According to Mckinsey, engaged and satisfied call center employees are:

• 5x more likely to stay than leave within a year
• 4x more likely to stay than dissatisfied colleagues
• 16x more likely to refer friends to the company
• 3x more likely to feel empowered to resolve customer issues

Companies with engaged and satisfied call center employees also experience reduced operating costs and improved customer satisfaction, as seen in improved metrics, such as customer lifetime value (CLV), customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES).

2. Reduced Cost and Maximized Resources

With the cloud, you have access to the newest – and regularly updated at no additional cost – technology. As a result, your contact center operates smoothly without interruption while your agents and customers are satisfied with the latest communication options.

The cloud has automatic updates, maximizing your IT team’s time and eliminating hardware headaches. When there is a new feature or additional functionality, a necessary fix, or a required security update, the user simply needs to refresh the browser, providing you significant cost savings and the benefits of speed and efficiency. The cloud eliminates the need for additional hardware or the need to configure new with existing hardware. And, with cloud-based contact centers, a vendor or outsource provider manages all the implementation, hosting, operations, upgrades and move, add, change (MAC) work. By offloading maintenance to a cloud service provider, your IT team can focus on developing new capabilities to improve business outcomes.
With the cloud, you maximize your contact center resources and you don’t have to purchase, maintain and upgrade expensive systems and equipment. You can use those funds instead to develop new enhancements to your customer experience. And, because of its elasticity, the cloud significantly reduces wasted resources within a contact center, allowing you to flex as needed to address peak operating requirements.

3. Increased Flexibility with Integration and a Virtual Workforce

Cloud-based solutions allow your contact center the flexibility to integrate with other cloud applications quickly and easily. As the saying goes, “knowledge is power,” and agents with the ability to use a company’s CRM system tied into the phone system gives them power. And, because the cloud uses rest API’s, integrations are seamless, giving agents the information needed to assist customers.

 Cloud-based solutions make a flexible environment possible for your agent workforce. Agent turnover is still the number one challenge for contact centers. This survey’s results point to inflexible work environment as a key contributor to high turnover. Cloud contact centers provides you the ability to support a virtual workforce, allowing you to offer a flexible work environment, scale up or down while controlling costs, hire employees nationwide, have agents available during a natural disaster, and extend contact center hours.

4. Scalable, Redundant, and Robust Architecture

A cloud contact center solution allows you to have a disaster recovery plan because of its geographic redundancy and guaranteed up-time. Disasters and hardware failures come without warning and can have a disastrous impact on your company’s brand and bottom line if your contact center is not in the cloud. The largest part of a contact center’s readiness for a disaster is the technology. Having your system and data in the cloud, instead of on-premise, helps ensure you can recover quickly from a natural disaster, power failure or other unexpected event.
The cloud’s flexible architecture enables your contact center the ability to be extremely scalable, affording your organization the opportunity to:

• Save thousands or even millions of dollars added to your bottom line
• The capability to add digital channels to meet customer expectations
• The ability to better monitor and plug revenue leakage
• Scale up to accommodate an anticipated or unexpected surge in activity and then scale down when the additional capacity is no longer needed
• Provides the ability to evolve and take advantage of future innovations

5.     Enhance Security and Compliance

Cloud computing provides the highest level of security available. Research suggests insider threats account for anywhere from 60 to 75 percent of IT breaches. Cloud providers make it their business to stay ahead of security threats, and their security measures are often superior because of economies of scale, specialized security staff, and their strong focus on security. And, cloud phone and contact center infrastructure is housed in geographically redundant network operations centers linked via highly secure connectivity, boosting your security.

Cloud Adoption Has Arrived

In short, Cloud-based solutions empower you to lower costs, improve the customer and employee experience, create an executable disaster recovery solution, improve your scalability, and enhance your security. (And more!)

Best-in-class contact centers are modernizing today with tomorrow’s customer experience in mind. Cloud platforms enable companies to build applications at unprecedented speed and flexibility, keeping up with customer expectations. They’re global, scalable, and cost-effective, and they don’t require massive budgets and lengthy installations. All in all, the cloud also empowers businesses to create contact centers uniquely designed for their customer and business requirements.

Customer experience will only become more important in the years ahead and the cloud can make an enormous difference in the quality of your customer’s experience. What are you waiting for?

Let’s Talk

To learn more about how to take advantage of a cloud contact center solutions, contact VDS.